Some Would Have You Believe David Brooks Is An Airhead

. . . and they would be right. But he is a malignant airhead. In a return to the misleading GOP serving shill that we have all come to know and detest, David Brooks serves up a sexist screed that would have you believe that since Dems like FDR and Nancy Pelosi and buffoons like George Bush were/are rich, that they are all the same:

I have a dream, my friends. I have a dream that we are approaching the day when a ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush will make peace with a vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi.

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.

Furthermore, I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich — between Randian hedge fund managers on the right and helipad environmentalists on the left. I dream that the big-money people who seem to dominate our politics will put aside their partisan fury and discover the class solidarity that Karl Marx always said they shared, and their newfound civility will trickle down to the rest of us. I dream that Berkeley will make peace with Buckhead, Streisand with DeVos, Huffington with O’Reilly.

What a liar. The rest of us Brooks? You are the common man? FDR was just a rich guy like George Bush? What a lying snake.

Of course this is part of the new GOP civility offensive and a shot across the bow at the Democrats' newfound commitment to populism.

. . . Brooks put it in his bestselling book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Bobos was a bestseller not only because it captured the mores of middle-aged, blue-state Boomers--people who wear expedition-quality anoraks to shovel snow and spend thousands of dollars on brand-new dinner tables designed to look worn and authentic--but also because he was sympathetic to his subjects. (A wise move, as they were also his audience.) "I'm a member of this class," Brooks assured readers. "We're not so bad."

Of course now it is better to be a regular Joe for his purposes railing against the rich. Brooks the Populist. What a joke. As Nick Confessore, now ironically a fellow Timesman, put it:

Brooks the Hack indulges in predictable--and frequently dishonest--caricatures of Democrats. He once wrote that "upscale areas everywhere" voted for Al Gore, even though a cursory check of census data reveals that seven of the 10 richest counties in America voted for George W. Bush in 2000. When it began to look like John Kerry would carry the Democratic banner in 2004, Brooks argued that the Democrats "won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower" this of a party whose last five nominees included a Georgia peanut farmer, a guy raised by a working-class single mom in Arkansas, and another born to Greek immigrants. Yet Brooks the Hack seems to revel in cheap shots, such as implying that the term "neocon" was anti-Semitic "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'," he recently wrote in the Times.
More broadly, whereas Brooks the Journalist unfurls grand abstractions that illuminate essential truths about American life, Brooks the Hack peddles unreliable generalizations that describe the world as he and his friends wish it to be. Every pundit makes bad calls during election season, but only Brooks was of the opinion that "[t]he closest thing to a Dean resistance movement is emerging inside the Lieberman campaign," as he wrote in December 2003, when the steadfastly pro-war senator was parked in a race for fifth. When Brooks set out to describe the differences between red and blue America--by driving a whopping 65 miles from Bethesda, Md., to Franklin County, Pa.--he produced an article replete with seemingly knowing observations that turned out to be factually wrong. Brooks says few blue staters "could name even five NASCAR drivers"; but as reporter Sasha Issenberg noted in Philadelphia magazine, three of the five top markets for the Winston Cup are in blue states. Brooks says that Red America is home-shopping country, but it turns out that QVC's audiences skew towards affluent, suburban blue staters. Brooks says you can't spend more than $20 at a restaurant in Franklin County, when in fact it's possible to blow $50 on veal medallions and wild-rice pilaf at a bed-and-breakfast where Brooks himself had spent the night.

and probably always has been. he's basically a republican shill, masquerading as an "independent" commentator. and it isn't a particularly good mask.

take anything he says, and dump a 50lb sack of salt on him.

funny thing though, as i recall (and i'd have to go check to be 100% certain), this same bozo accused both gore and kerry of being rich, eastern elites, while conveniently ignoring the fact that bush is a rich, eastern elite. maybe, the fact that gore & kerry both at least seem smarter than bush, led brooks to believe bush really is the academically impoverished son of poor, black, texas sharecroppers.

bush, from great wealth, expensive private schools, etc, etc, etc. however, through herculean effort, he managed to overcome all that, and still end up an intellectually bereft failure.